I have strong feelings about these micro-opinion tools that myriad of social media has fine tuned over the years. They are, surely, extremely functional within their respective contexts, but they also has undeniable overbearing effects on people as 'social' beings. Perhaps, the Like button appears to be a scapegoat here, but I believe it is not the only culprit, but one of many which are turning our conversations into mere repetitions. Yes, it's a new phenomenon and since we are born into that, we may not recognize the effects truly, but I feel we are slowly and surely leaning towards repeting what is already said before us instead of creating original content or presenting a different angle.
Retweet or reblog gives us a chance to actually curate our own feeds or personal spaces in the hope it reflects our own uniqueness. By repeting what we think appropriate to our unique personal existence, we in fact are only curating a virtual presence, which ultimately yields nothing but a cacaphony among the grand total of things. Creativity and subtlety have been turned into mere repetitions, either in the form of Like or Retweet. This is not a bad thing, per se, but a different culture nonetheless, which I think needs to be thoroughly analyzed and inspected. And it's highly related to Like/Dislike discussion as well.
It's a whirlpool, really. Micro-communication tools beget another, which eventually skim down all sorts of elaborate communications between people. I've seen many times that Like feature on Facebook has been facilitated as a social lynch tool. It creates an irresistable snowball effect and all of a sudden, everybody starts to jump on the bandwagon because it gives a false sense of security among the society--being in the majority. It in turn discourages those who appears to be in the minority, who otherwise would have wanted to continue conversation. That's a short cut, at its best, and it adds too little to the communication.
This is the thing with these micro tools. What they all do are iteration and multiplication without a discernible depth. Instant satisfaction (and by extension microfame) rules our own little worlds for quite a while. These tools do nothing but encourage it. I am using Like button here in the forum and I'd probably use Dislike button as well, but I am skeptical. I do extra care not to undermine my ability to add something new to the conversation, not repeting but presenting a new angle as far as I can. So, perhaps a Dislike button might come with an obligatory option forcing the user to give an explanation why they choose to hit that button. I know it's not practical, but theoretically, it should summarize my position.
Thanks for bearing with me through that dull post.